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Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and other natural disasters shed light on social cracks and fissures invisible in everyday life. These disasters provoke social crises that states tend to resolve with militarization, which in turn shows the profound crises that our societies have been undergoing.

"The epicenter is in the ground, therefore there shouldn't be a tsunami," was the navy's response at 5:20 a.m. to President Michelle Bachelet, almost two hours after an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale shook Chile. Ten minutes later, the tsunami alarm that had been issued at 3:55 a.m. was deactivated.1 Before and after that time, several gigantic waves battered the southern coast of Chile. Of the more than 800 deaths, half were caused by the tsunami.

Haiti's road to recovery took a new twist Wednesday as a trade group representing private security contractors wrapped up a conference on reconstruction in the earthquake-battered nation.

"You don't want to look like you're profiteering off situations like these," Derrell Griffith, project director at Sabre International, said. "But there is a need and the people need it quick."

The conference was organized by the Association of the Stability Operations Industry, also known as IPOA, representing some 60 companies working in logistics and security, many of them active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Co-organizer and IPOA president Doug Brooks said private contractors can offer aid groups and government agencies myriad services -- from translation to police training to running supply lines -- as Haiti gets back on its feet.

While critics say private contractors have run loose in far-flung crisis zones, supporters point to their larger role guarding officials and convoys, and building infrastructure.

Chile is experiencing a social earthquake in the aftermath of the 8.8 magnitude quake that struck the country on February 27. “The fault lines of the Chilean Economic Miracle have been exposed,” says Elias Padilla, an anthropology professor at the Academic University of Christian Humanism in Santiago. “The free market, neo-liberal economic model that Chile has followed since the Pinochet dictatorship has feet of mud.”

Chile is one of the most inequitable societies in the world. Today, 14 percent of the population lives in abject poverty. The top 20 percent captures 50 percent of the national income, while the bottom 20 percent earns only 5 percent. In a 2005 World Bank survey of 124 countries, Chile ranked twelfth in the list of countries with the worst distribution of income.

Yesterday was the Oscars. Last year's Best Actor Sean Penn made the morning's headlines, donating a million dollars to Haiti's relief / reconstruction effort. Collectively U.S. citizens have donated $1 billion so far. Two questions arise: one, which I and many others have asked numerous times, where is this money being spent, how, and what plan? A second, related question is where Haiti will get the funds for the rest of the effort conservatively estimated at $16 billion.

Private charitable donations can only go so far. Where is the rest of the reconstruction coming from? What is the plan of these other actors? Generally speaking there are two sets of actors: the "public sector" and the "private sector." I put both in quotes because there is considerable slippage between governments and private, for-profit investors or companies, in the U.S. as in Haiti. Both sets of actors have a planning conference coming up, one in Miami and the other in New York.

Since January's devastating earthquake in Haiti, well-meaning experts have proposed an abundance of short-term and long-term recovery solutions. They ask why aid delivery has been so slow, why previous development plans for Haiti have rarely been successful, and why billions of dollars in funding over decades have not improved conditions for the most impoverished people in our hemisphere.

Some blame the government of Haiti, while others, including the organizations we represent, often point fingers at the international community. The simple answer is that those who have the greatest stake in rebuilding Haiti, Haitians themselves, don't now and never have had a real seat at the table.

Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September ’08 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn’t been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far fetched.

Critics are concerned that private military contractors are positioning themselves at the centre of an emerging "shock doctrine" for earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Next month, a prominent umbrella organisation for private military and logistic corporations, the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), is co-organising a "Haiti summit" which aims to bring together "leading officials" for "private consultations with attending contractors and investors" in Miami, Florida.

Dubbed the "mercenary trade association" by journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: the Rise of the World' Most Powerful Mercenary Army", the IPOA wasted no time setting up a "Haiti Earthquake Support" page on its website following the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the Caribbean country.

If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to
getting something it has deserved for a very long time:
full
"forgiveness" of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian
economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious
optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English,
but "It's time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and
restitution for the devastating consequences of debt." In this telling,
the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he
argues, is a creditor—and it is we, in the West, who are deeply in
arrears.

Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US
occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not
fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple
violations of legal norms and agreements. Here, far too briefly, are
highlights of the Haiti case.

[The following was co-written by Naomi Klein, author of the #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, Terry Tempest Williams, world renowned wildlife author, Bill Mckibben, founder of 350.org and author of The End Of Nature, and Dr. James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, and who is regarded as the world's leading climatologist. All recognize the trial of Tim DeChristopher to be a turning point in the climate movement. Included are links to resources for travel to Utah].

Dear Friends,

The epic fight to ward off global warming and transform the energy system that is at the core of our planet’s economy takes many forms: huge global days of action, giant international conferences like the one that just failed in Copenhagen, small gestures in the homes of countless people.

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti-quake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now -- the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakable grief that could last for years. In the middle of Haiti's nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions of people like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history -- one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of The Free Market has rolled out across the world because The People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatize the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

Last week started with a conference in Montreal, called by a group of governments and international agencies calling themselves Friends of Haiti, to discuss the long and short term needs of the recently devastated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake's rubble and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled "friends" would not commit to cancelling Haiti's $1bn debt. Instead they agreed to a 10-year plan with no details, and a commitment to meet again – when the bodies have been buried along with coverage of the country – sometime in the future.

A few days later in Washington, Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, came before the house oversight committee to explain why he paid top dollar for $85bn worth of toxic assets when he bailed out the insurance company AIG. Geithner said he was faced with a "tragic choice". "The moral, fair and just choice is to protect the innocent," he said.

In the wake of the earthquake that has killed more than 100,000 people
in Haiti, the foreign ministers of several countries calling themselves
the "Friends of Haiti" met on Monday in Montreal to discuss
plans for "building a new Haiti." Participants in the Ministerial Preparatory
Conference on Haiti, who included Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton; representatives of international financial institutions
including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive came to what Canadian
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, the conference chair, referred
to as a "road map towards Haiti's reconstruction and development."

One of the foremost critics of Israel’s Gaza policies turned her guns on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday for ignoring human rights violations both domestically and internationally.

Activist and journalist Naomi Klein criticized the Turkish government for ignoring the rights of its own Kurdish and Armenian population while voicing solidarity with the plight of Palestinians. She said it is easy to stand up for Palestinian rights in Turkey because it is “popular, populist.”

Speaking at a seminar at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University where a part of a conference was held in memory of slain Turkish–Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Klein talked about activities to boycott Israel in order to uphold the rights of Palestinians.

Just days after Naomi praised the International Monetary Fund for its historic advocacy of turning a $100 million emergency loan to Haiti into a grant, the institution seized up and began back-pedaling on debt relief. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn clearly proposed converting the loan to a grant on January 20:

"The most important thing is that the IMF is now working with all donors to try to delete all the Haitian debt, including our new loan. If we succeed—and I'm sure we will succeed—even this loan will turn out to be finally a grant, because all the debt will have been deleted. And that's the very important thing for Haiti now."

Yet when he wrote of the loan just two days later in the Huffington Post, he dropped all the language of giving this emergency aid in grant form:

Everyone agrees that the Haiti earthquake is a serious situation.
Serious enough for the US to send thousands of Marines, to take over the
airport, to suspend Haiti's sovereignty and take over the operation.
Serious enough to unify the bitter partisan divide and put Bush,
Clinton, and Obama together to raise funds. Serious enough for benefit
concerts and the invention of new forms of philanthropy, where people
can donate through their cell phones. But the Haiti earthquake is
apparently not all that serious:

1. It's not serious enough to give undocumented Haitians a full amnesty.
Yes, it was serious enough to give them Temporary Protected Status
(TPS), which they'd been asking for for years, so that they can send
back money legally and so they're not in danger of being deported back
to their re-devastated country. But they still have to pay $470 dollars
for registering (every dollar of which could have gone to Haiti – which
adds up to millions of dollars if more than a few thousand register and
pay the fee), and after their 18 month grace period ends they will be in
the system and easier to deport than they were before registering.